Free Mila's Tale by Laurie King Page B

being closer to home meant the fighting became more personal.  These were a man’s neighbors who were threatening him, not some bastards hundreds of miles from home.  The war’s boundaries contracted, but the fighting became ever more vicious.  Especially in the mountains.
                  It was the end of a hot, dry, bloody summer.  The country had known war for so long, it was accustomed to terror.  Bombs flew over fields where men and women worked as their grandparents had.  Snipers lurked in the streets and alleys of the cities, while women with shopping bags darted across the pock-marked pavement toward the corners where the trucks bringing cabbages and flour dared approach.  Newsmen in rumpled field dress spoke urgently into camera lenses, eager for an interview with the picturesque criminal-turned-soldier.  And Jephtha, with long experience in getting people what they wanted, made sure they had their pictures: brave boys in stretchers; weeping mothers; rifles propped at the doors of churches where his men attended funerals for children, then taken up again as the men returned to the business of war.
                  Inexorably, the war bore in on itself.
                  In the beginning of September, word came to Mila that a woman in the next village over had been in labor with her first child for thirty hours.  The intensifying warfare had driven the Americans away, tearful and swearing to return; the nearest doctor was now half a day away.  The midwife was on the edge of despair, and sent to Mila: Was there anything the Americans had taught her that could help this woman?
                  Mila gazed at the face of the midwife’s messenger, and felt suddenly cold in the hot, dusty summer night.  She was nineteen years old, could set an arm and suture a gash, she could give injections, use simple drugs, and had once successfully inserted a drip line into the back of a patient’s hand.   She knew what to do in the case of an epidemic and had picked up a fair amount of herbal lore over the years since moving back home, but she was no doctor.  The midwife, herself the mother of four, had been working these mountains for fifteen years; what could Mila possibly know that she did not?
                  The messenger replied, “She said you had helped with the operation to take a child.”
                  And that was what Mila knew that the midwife did not.  She had—once, mind you, just once—assisted at a Caesarean operation, seen the way the American doctor had delicately slit the straining flesh of the pregnant woman and lifted the dark, limp infant from the womb into the air.  It had, against all expectations, been a success, and the infant was now a round-cheeked two year-old troublemaker, the pride of his mother and father. 
                  “She said, the woman will die anyway, that you might save the child.”
                  So might a butcher, Mila thought to herself.  But without a word, she went to find the bag of equipment that the Americans had given her as they departed for safer lands.  She opened it to make sure that the scalpels and suture kits and IV drip equipment were there, added a collection of the herbs that might help a laboring woman push or a surgical patient stop bleeding, and took up her robe to follow the messenger out into the night.
                  The moon was full, and the rumble and flash of what might have been a thunderstorm played over the next ridge of mountains.  It was not thunder, although by now, artillery was itself a force of Nature.  Mila followed the messenger through the fields and up the mountain track, which was steep and narrow but to the sure-footed, quicker than the road, and far safer.  Mila knew her father was out there somewhere, maybe even where those lights flared and rumbled on the horizon, but she never thought about him much, other